Ingeborg Bachmann Prize: Tijan Sila receives Bachmann Prize: No games

Tijan Sila won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize at the 48th Days of German Language Literature in Klagenfurt. “The day my mother went crazy” was the title of his text, an excerpt from the novel he is currently working on and which is due to be published in 2026, as a sequel to his novel “Radio Sarajevo” from last year. It would be his third long autofictional text about his childhood and youth, first in Yugoslavia and then as a refugee from Yugoslavia in Germany.

Sila was born in Sarajevo in 1981, fled during the siege of the city and came to Kaiserslautern in 1994, where he still lives and works as a vocational school teacher. The siege of Sarejevo in the Bosnian War by the Yugoslav People’s Army, or what was left of it under mainly Serbian command, lasted from 1992 to 1996 and is considered the longest military siege of the 20th century.

In his debut novel »Animals Unlimited« in 2017, Sila told a contrasting and fast-paced story about growing up in Sarajevo under fire and then among neo-Nazis in the Palatinate province, where his hero has to realize »that despite all the talk about democracy, the Germans were just as nasty beasts as the rest Europe”. In “Radio Sarajevo” he then describes “a youth between blue helmets and Bon Jovi,” as Micky Beisenherz put it.

The civil war in the collapsed Yugoslavia is a prime example of the ethnicization of causal economic conflicts; for a barbaric identity politics, which is also being pushed forward politically very successfully by the right, fueled by neoliberalism, which questions any form of a balancing totality. People go crazy over the economy and think it has something to do with them personally, or even with a so-called people. Not to mention the damned religion.

“The day my mother went crazy,” Silas’s winning text in Klagenfurt, tells the story of a couple of parents’ flight into madness after their escape from madness in Bosnia in an entertaining and depressing way. They are unemployed, a German major and a library scientist, whose “communist doctorates” are now worthless. The son and narrator visits her and is suspected by the mother of having changed sides, he just doesn’t know which side she means. As if there was still war. She tells her son not to play “games” with her. He wants to escape to his old childhood room, but his father has piled up a mountain of old electrical appliances in it. To repair them and then sell them, like back in Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists. And then the son feels the “fear of falling apart” again, just like he did back in the bunker. Like a mantra, he says he’s here to stay. He doesn’t want to run away from his parents, but he definitely doesn’t want to go back to the past.